While taking a day off from Thesis

I am taking today off thesis but will be back on with it tomorrow as I have a chapter to finish. It should be straightforward but I need to refocus myself and make sure I get to the right point at the end.

I am trying to think back over the last fortnight, which has been heavily dominated by work and thesis, and I really can only think of a couple of other stories with those.

Work wise it is finishing off projects. I have spent quite a bit of time with a PhD student who had done a number of surveys and someone else had done a very interim analysis. I have done about four different analyses for her and I suspect that she will in the end get most from the simple statistics I got to do half way through. A lot of it felt as if she was trying to walk before she could run as she would find a technique in a paper and then want to do that. One I eventually concluded was pointless, the second may produce something vaguely interesting but I am cautious over whether the data is suitable. Well we shall see what happens.

Then there has been work for human nutrition, I am amazed at the way people assume I am an authority because I can do the statistics. I think I have just about got to the last pull on the masters projects there, but next month I am going to be leading a workshop on helping other to analyse ANOVAs. It feels weird to suddenly find out that I am looked upon as this very expert Statistician, as this is basically training people to do the sort of work I have been doing for the last nineteen years. Other than that, I am developing a communications role within my team at work which means that I will be tangential to the power structure but not totally outside it. I suppose that really is where I prefer to be. I am also due to test a range of software next week so it is all go despite the fact I am only in two work for two days.

Thesis wise I have really been getting my head around the tradition, I think I am in the position almost to conclude my chapter on tradition tomorrow and to be able to argue that in some ways it is a self reproducing system of engagement that works on a variety of levels. In writing it has been remarkable easy to argue that what seems to happen in every age is that you get a configuration of similar tension that people work with. As they resolve some of the tensions or a new situation arises that normally involve working with the other tensions in the systems. One such system is that that links meaning and practice. Sometimes practice comes through semi-attached to thought and sometimes meaning seems to disengage from one set of practices but then engage with another (wee cuppies anyone and sharing together anyone). Anyway I have less than 2000 words on this chapter to write and I think I may be able to cover that in the process of writing tomorrow. That unfortunately means my tidy up of the Worship chapter will have to wait to next weekend (well Thursday probably) so as to get the data chapters out to my congregations.

Other bits, Jean and James took me out to Nirmals which is a bit of a Sheffield institution. It is an experience but Mrs Nirmal was certainly less pushy than in the past, only slightly put out when James did not take his mango pip in his hands and suck it. The food was good (the mango was superb), the company excellent but I am afraid I was not up to it and was rather quiet, not really sure why but I was, maybe a bit of migraine in the offing.

I also have bought myself a charcoal grey cardigan. It surprised me somewhat that I should need it as I normally steer away from black but I noticed that I have both two pairs of black jeans and a grey pair. My other cardigans work with them if I am wearing the right blouse but some of my blouses just don’t mix with the cardigans so I decided to get a grey/black one and have it for wearing when I do not want to think.

Today should have been a thesis Sunday but Anne Parker was preaching at St Andrews and wanted to show slides of her trip to Bangladesh in 2011. This meant instead of a sermon we had what was close to a personal testimony, it needs a bit more polish and it will be very good indeed. It also meant that somebody needed to work the technology and that somebody was me. I think if I had been sensible I would have found time this weekend to go to church and set up beforehand, as it was the technology only started talking together during the first hymn. It looked like a loose connection on the projector, I really should do some more researching of that but I had swapped two cables, two computers already and it was not fixed, I was just to give up and suddenly it worked.

Toadstool beads that I made today

Otherwise I have spent today making fly agaric style toadstool beads, I need one for a hedgehog amigurumi I am making. The style of bead is quite specific and I could not find any on the internet even at the website the book said sold them. However the more I thought about it the more I thought it would be relatively easy to make. So I bought some polymer clay and today I had a go at making fifteen. That means I have fourteen spare , but given the amount of time crocheting the spikes requires I am NOT going to make fourteen more hedgehogs. I have ideas for a use and we will have to see. Actually for my first attempt at using polymer clay it seemed quite successful.

I have also been playing around with cover designs for the book writers group is doing. I hope to get another chance to play with that next weekend.

During a very busy time with the thesis

This will have to be short as my parents will phone in a bit and I also need to get the flat into some sort of order so that my cleaner can come tomorrow and sort things. I am afraid things are busy, busy and although I am hoping I can take two unallocated days holiday before the end of August I am not holding my breath.

The four major things are the coming over of Cathy with Hannah and Sam to Sheffield, going to supervision the following wednesday, my parents visiting on the Saturday and finally going geocaching at Shaw with Cathy and Hannah and Sam.

Cathy, Hannah and Sam seem to be pretty good at bringing good weather with them when they come over to Sheffield, as the day was gloriously warm. I remember for my mum’s eightieth birthday we considered sitting out to drink coffee, not bad when you realise my mum’s birthday is in February. Anyway they came earlier than usual and we took them up to Waterstones on the pretence that Cathy and I wanted a coffee and a natter. They are innocent enough to think we would really walk right across town to get a coffee just because we liked the coffee shop.  The fact was that I was giving them book tokens for them to spend while we nattered. It worked and it was amazing how much having spending money and Aunts and mums who were not going to give huge amounts extra concentrated their minds. Then we went to Ponds Forge but it was the National Swimming Championships and they were not allowing people into the leisure pool until 12:30. Anyway Sam wanted a tennis racket from Decathlon and Hannah needed a new swimsuit so we went along there, which was quite a walk, bought the things and got ourselves a drink for a local Sainsbury’s supermarket. Then came back and joined the queue for the leisure pool. Sam was clearly the best swimmer there and I could see some people staring at the way he confidently dived into a wave. Then we went and found a chinese buffet, not the usual one as that has shut but one up by Victoria Hall which did a good line in prawn crackers. Then back to the station where the kids played table tennis before catching the train home

The following week I had a supervision at Birmingham, the day was damp for once.There is more on my thesis blog , but the day was unusually damp. My supervisor suggested restructuring my thesis, as I was struggling with the theory for the chapter on worship and then the argument was going to have to be written in. That means major rewrites on all three data chapters to date. Instead he suggested that I wrote the theory into three separate chapters. Oddly enough the act of doing this which I though was initially going to change the basis of my thesis has re-adjusted it and has made it come more clear. I know what I am arguing in each of the three chapters. I am still slightly concerned about my final one, where I have to step back and take an even bigger view than I have done in my other two theory chapters but which will pull the whole thing into a cohesive whole. There are also bits of the chapters which have been written that I need to pull out and put into the new chapters. My supervisor said it meant I was only halfway through but it felt as if I was only half way through despite my count on my blog saying I was three quarters. I have also put the third chapter into a draft form which means that once it has been proof read these three chapters can go out to the congregations for reading.

Then at the weekend my parents came over, we are making a habit of going out to Old Moor nature reserve when they come as it seems to provide a good entertainments. This time they had a DVD of birds showing on a large screen in the cafe and it succeeded in distracting both me and Dad while we ate our lunch and later had a cup of tea. There were no unusual sightings this time but trundling between hides and then sitting in them seems to suit my parents as a way to spend the afternoon. The fact that there are nice cakes back at the Gannet Cafe for when they are feeling peckish is no bad thing. Dad as usual had been pessimistic about the weather but I said we could at least get lunch at the cafe, in the end he was too warmly dressed for the weather and there was no sign of rain.

Then last Tuesday I hired a car and went over to Cathy’s for the afternoon. The aim was to see if we could get geocaching to work. We tried for a couple of spots very local to them, one in a park that is being refurbished and the other just the other side of the road from it. The answer is that my sister is very good at finding the caches provided she is looking in the right place for the right thing. However my older satnav is not that good for finding them being only accurate to about 50 m, my phone one is a lot more accurate and in both instances the description is that accurate that when it was right we knew the place to within half a meter.  There are some problems in woodland areas but if the detail is accurate enough we can find them eventually. The only problem with my phones satnav was it decided to take me interesting routes through the back streets of Manchester both going and coming back. I should have obeyed my instinct and gone on the M60 when I crossed it going rather than being diverted.

Other than that I have been busy with work and not had the normal space in the day to fit in extra students so I have been diverting them to MASH (Maths and Statistics Help). However that is looking like a cooperation that might well work out so as to make that side of my work more like a team than an individual with me specialising in long term support of researchers and they with taught students and with doctoral students splitting it between us. We will also be working to create resources others can use without seeing us personally and to move towards providing just in time workshops on using statistical research. The other thing is that I am getting more managerial roles, not managing people but the sort of thing that keeps things moving such as making sure people are informed and that environment feels good.